What time do most Americans get to work? – Gallery

Visualization

Data Notes

The largest group of American workers continue to arrive at work between 7:45 AM and 7:59 AM as we showed with a similar analysis last year. This year I decided to try and make the visualization a little more interesting with the newest data available. I used Tableau to create the visualization and excel to help me with some of the data editing. The data comes from the 2016 ACS 1 Year Public Use Microdata Sample which can be found on the ACS Website.

I decided to use ACS PUMS instead of the published data tables because the published tables have unequal time intervals that I think are meant to show fairly similar group sizes. The PUMS data though has this variable broken out into 5 minute time intervals except for three instances where it is a 10 minute interval. I went ahead and combined the data into 15 minute intervals using the Tableau’s calculated field option, some excel functions, and the ACS PUMS Data Dictionary.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the visualization does not include workers that work at home. The ACS has made the decision not to ask those workers the series of questions that involve commuting.